The context of my comment was someone labeling the practice anti-competitive. That's where harm comes into the picture.

I'm sure that the stuff will continue to get bad press, the idea of centrally controlled hardware is offensive to a large chunk of the people that bother to think about it.

Anti-competitive includes future harm. The way bundling IE was found anticompetitive by US and EU courts. Specifically, it is illegal to leverage monopoly in one market to gain entry to others - because history has shown that this is always abused and eventually harms society.

>Otherwise, Microsoft, Secure Boot-enabled laptops, and anything with a Windows 8 sticker will continue to get lots of bad press.

The iPad and iPhone got loads of bad press about the lockdown, the 30% cut of all in app payments and rejecting things like Android magazine apps and a bunch of other stuff. And Apple still can barely keep up with the demand. I think consumers have been conditioned by iOS not to think about openness.

By iOS? I do not remember seeing people walk the streets in protest against the closed nature of XBox, PS2, Playstation,…, or the Xerox 9700.

If you disagree, please give some proof of consumers (at large, as opposed to small groups, or at least in greater numbers than they do today) thinking of openness before iOS.

Look at the media coverage of Palladium, Trusted Computing etc.... it was brutally against it. When the iPad hit, the media was mostly about fawning over it and pushing the openness concerns under the rug for the most part.

Thanks reminding me of that case. Thinking of this, it is a nice example of why one has to start shouting for the tiniest infringement of rights. Trusted computing got press because people knew it was a battle that could lose the war. iOS and the App store, on the other hand, seemed a battle not worth fighting over when they debuted.